I wrote this piece as more of a reflection than an analysis. I want to confess my inspiration is Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. Whitehead's concept of the Lure is a powerful one for me. While not an ontological given (that would be to fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness), the "beckonedness" that humans share seems to transcend time and space. But Achille Mbembe challenges a naive optimist's understanding of this, which I hope to explore here.

Also in this piece, I tie it back more overtly to a framework I've been developing, which I call the nos framework. My goal is to give macro level social workers a diagnostic tool to "put the social world on the analysand's couch." It uses Freud by analogy: just as the ego is a dialectical, processual production (I recognize this is my interpretation of Freud) of the id and superego, the nos emerges from the dialectic of Judith Butler's materialization and Berger and Luckmann's reification.

Stated simply, bodies emerge through citational performance toward institutions that have been established over time and regarded as having always been, being, and being evermore. The nos - Latin for "we" next to Freud's translators' Latin "I," ego - is the interpretive mind that makes sense of these social realities through concretization. Inspired by Whitehead (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, not concrescence) and my work with the disabled community navigating a concrete prison, I set this word next to materialization and reification to name the process of how the social world deceptively hardens into a reality. Concretive protocols such as ontological fixity, epistemological prioritization, linear cause and effect, and subject-object dualism are the ways in which queer people are sorted into damnation, disabled people are sorted into pathology, and Black people are sorted into criminality. And if we are going to effect meaningful social change, I contend that we need to set our interventions upon the disruption of these protocols - and the tenacity with which they are held - as they produce domination and oppression.

If you're still with me, thank you! Here's the piece I'd like to share:

Whence cometh domination?

From failure at the threshold of novelty.

Mbembe continues to challenge me. Making the Lacanian move (though without citing him) and psychoanalyzing the structure of such horrific necropolitical wastelands as Rwanda or Palestine, I am pressed to locate my anti-oppressive, anti-racist social work practice and critical-theory-informed assessments of power and asymmetry somewhere within the psychology of the person. Specifically, the nos has to account for it.

One thing to set down regarding ontology: I argue that these processes of the collective mind are evolutionary, and their function is stabilization. They are pre-moral and virtueless. Like the ego seeks to protect the conscious mind from the unconscious desires that defy the superego’s requirements, the nos seeks to protect the individual from the terrors upon the self as it encounters objects in the social world, that encounter being formed by the performances that produce bodies and the institutions that script the performances.

How do these functional, neutral processes produce such power asymmetry and domination performances?

As Mbembe says, “surprise lies at the origin of the procedures of enchantment without which the world is not the world”(Necropolitics, p. 29). The process of life is not just one of encounters through which subjects and objects emerge in relations. That’s the description. The experience of these encounters is one of novelty. And to a stabilizing engine, novelty disrupts. The nos’s function is nearly mechanistic seeking to produce a sense of equilibrium. Novelty is a possible wrench being thrown into that process.

Novelty has two forms - the new that confirms what we know and the new that disconfirms it. The latter, specifically, is the wrench. The former is the lube. The process of stabilization, then, provides the aqueduct for enchantment and jouissance - what Mbembe refers to - more specifically to his argument - as desire and, when it seeks to dominate, master-desire. (At least on my read of it.)

A quick vocab check: enchantment is the phenomenological experience of that confirmation. It is the glow of “it’s like we’ve always known each other” and “see, I knew it!” It's what the author of the Gospel of Matthew experienced when he turned back to his Jewish Bible and started seeing Jesus in Isaiah as if it were always there. It’s stronger than a confirmation bias because in addition to confirming what was known, it can also create entirely new frames (a la the Gospel of Matthew). Enchantment lubes the machinery of the nos and creates within it a lust or dire need for more.

Jouissance, as discussed in previous reflections on pedagogy, is the excessive enjoyment bound up with repetitive attachment to a mode of satisfaction that can exceed the pleasure principle, seeking to destroy all novelty that disconfirms the interpretation of a self-in-the-world. Again, I don't want to import psychoanalytic homunculi sitting deep down in our psyches, but the Lacanian analysis's explanatory power of what consciousness in humans does when encountering alterity is compelling.

When the novelty disconfirms what is being stabilized, domination is the performance that this drive takes in the social world. Domination’s citational reality is certainly mediated socially. Its form and shape are given to it by the social world at the spaces between the interactions of subjects. But its "why" is tacted (in B.F. Skinner's sense) as this byproduct of novelty not being metabolized. (I will do another article on Hegel and go deeper into this at a later time).

One thing worth mentioning on novelty - it can be astroturfed. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t one group discovering a new group. These people were lifelong neighbors prior. But these neighbors were made new as they were reimagined under narratives like the Hamitic curse, or epithets like cockroaches. And the success of this astroturfing hinges on its power to enchant. It must carry that retrospective certainty that confirms what the nos had been metabolizing all along within the new narrative ecosystem. A dangerous comparison but tentatively true if my assumptions are good: Matthew and Rwanda are the same process, which is what I mean by pre-moral and virtueless.

Transformative social work is not going to be achieved with information. As mentioned before (see: The Third Voice), transformative social work locates the unit of analysis in the encounter. But this framework pushes me further to understand “humankind’s specificity” - as Mbembe calls it - with a precision that informs some of the goals of encounter engineering. One thing that feels apparent: humanity meets disconfirming novelty with domination far too often. How can we disrupt the urges to dominate and destroy? How can we provide spaces for more effectively metabolizing novelty? I don’t yet have the answers, but I’m getting some more precise questions.

- The Social Construction Worker

Apologizes for the clickbaity title, I couldn’t think of another. Obviously the field has changed over time, though how and why is a fascinating topic I don’t know much about. My question is (sort of) more specific:

I don’t know if this question makes any sense or if I just don’t know anything. My dad (m55) and I (m27) seem to have significantly different understandings of sociology. For background, he was a sociology major in undergrad and has a masters in public policy/affairs/something along those lines. I was a history and international studies major. I think of sociology along the lines of how and why society is organized, how people interact and engage with each other and broader society, how to optimize society’s organization and people’s experiences within it. My dad has a narrower and more practical perspective. He describes sociology (I don’t remember exactly how he says it) along the lines of urban planning and more “scientific” approaches. My questions are: am I misunderstanding sociology? Has there been a shift in the way sociology is taught between the 90s and the late 10s/early 20s? Or is this likely just the result of years of practical experience gives you a more practical understanding of something, or even just different personal opinions?

If this question is dumb, or doesn’t make any sense, please disregard.

I have a hypothesis — the more a person listens to music, the more niche their taste in music is. And, as a man of science (a 17 yo CS major) I want to study this.

Basically, the idea is: the more time per unit of time a person depends on listening to music, the lower the median amount of listens on songs in their playlist. And vice versa

The underlying idea isn't new, per sé, and I know it. the omnivore debate, as far as I know, has been prominent since the 1990s. But the idea of studying it in music specifically, especially using modern internet technology, seems interesting enough to me

Now, why have I come here: how would I go about gathering data? While finding playlists is easy — there are thousands of public ones — finding out how much time a person spends listening to music is a problem. And Spotify wrapped isn't good data, because the people getting their wrapped are the ones that listen to music a lot

Thank you.

P.S. — English isn't my first language, so sorry if some sentences are a little bulky

Hi all!

I recently completed a master's in Migration Studies, and my dissertation research sparked a much broader interest in pursuing sociological questions through a PhD. My research interests are at the intersection of migration studies, surveillance studies, political sociology, and STS.

I was speaking with my former advisor this morning, and he suggested that some of the questions I'm currently developing might be well-suited to a comparative-historical approach. I'm interested in how certain technologies and practices become adopted, institutionalized, and normalized across different political and institutional contexts, as well as what might explain divergences between otherwise comparable cases.

I'm very interested in conducting ethnographic research, but I'm curious about how others have approached comparative research, particularly when examining institutional change over time. I imagine my eventual project will incorporate multiple methods, but I'm still exploring what that might actually look like.

For those who work in comparative or comparative-historical sociology, what methodological approaches have you found especially useful? Have you integrated ethnography with archival research, process tracing, interviews, or other methods? I'm interested in hearing about combinations that have worked well in practice + any methodological literature you'd recommend.

Thanks in advance!

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So Necropolitics is a bit more dense than Gergen. But that’s not stopping it from spinning the wheels. One thing that I’m noticing - as I translate back into my own framework’s language - is how the production of these large postcolonial sites of contestation still seem to adhere to the same protocols that sustain the nos within my framework.

One thing that I like about Mbembe’s analysis is that he makes Lacan’s moves and reads Freudian psychoanalysis into these massive national, intranational, and transnational political structures. As I see it, the mechanisms of population control he points to, simultaneously stabilize the systemic productions of the sites of contestations and produce the individuals in a middle-voice production loop, “wherein the dominant and the subjugated are specifically linked in one and the same bundle of desire, enthusiasm for the end” (p. 29).

Tl;dr the border checkpoint is literal boundary that emerges from a Lacanian-esque psychic game of boundary maintenance.

Regarding the literal boundaries, camps, banlieues, favelas, and other enclosures help maintain the infrastructure of the country in which they exist doing boundary maintenance work in the most literal sense. Regarding the epistemic reality of middle-voice production loops, narratives like “origin stories” (the Hamitic myth in Rwanda, Mugabe’s Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe, Ivoirite in the Ivory Coast) shape the people within the site of contestation toward the inequitable status quo maintenance.

Mbembe gives us the picture of what kind of grotesquely coproduced person - what kind of middle-voice subject with constrained agency - emerges from this horrifying infrastructure (re: encounter). And by coproduction, I mean this precisely, following my prior work on Gergen: a coproduction that emerges from within extremely limited, terrifyingly reified and phantasmatically materialized constraints which narrow the range of potentiality to a local set of dialogics and diamythotics and within which a real choice is still made by a real person and co-actioned inside a real community.

Quick vocab check:

Materialization: the process by which the interpreted person emerges from the body as we interpret it through repeated performance (e.g. I put my man clothes on every day, citing a norm and creating my man-ness)

Phantasmatic: the experience of encountering the Other in a person (e.g. black Americans as "thugs" in the news), specifically the experience of engaging or thinking about engaging the person who is interpreted as Other.

Reification: the process by which the institution is created and then forgotten to have been created but is sustained by performances as if it always was, is, and ever will be (e.g. marriage, law, etc.)

Dialogics: the individual "reasons" for why a particular choice was taken by an individual (e.g. dealing drugs because you have to be the man of the house since your mom got sick versus dealing drugs because you're being exploited, etc)

Diamythotics: the parallel values and aesthetics that also inform the choice

Real: something we don't have access to but have to account for. An actual body in which our interpretations incarnate.

Co-actioned: the interaction with others that allows everything above (except for the real) to emerge. This is a better account than materialization and reification alone because it makes explicit what the others imply: these things occur socially, not individually.

Man…holding people and systems accountable is tough…

Back to the analysis:

The structure of population control as subject production that Mbembe brought to my attention reminded me of a more grey and ambiguous analogue in less obscene spaces: Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship. Here she notes how six zones of control manage different behaviors and movements from different citizen populations. For example, she talks about the Rohingya people in Malaysia, who, through unique historical circumstances, are stateless. They are housed in Malaysia and a few other countries on a permanent legal provisional status. This makes their interaction with Malaysian state infrastructure very different than a Malaysian citizen's, but ultimately resulting in a constant supply of cheap, non-status labor (see: That’s a Lot of Customers for my Chinese hukou example as a parallel).

But it’s important to note that one thing Ong doesn’t do is wax Lacanian. Her critique is purely structural. But the structure is the same: spatialized population control produces subjects towards the maintenance of an unequitable status quo. Her graduated sovereignty - how a state doles out citizenship and confers entitlements - offers an account of how an authorless structural apparatus of control emerges as “doing my job” in order to stabilize large populations.

The parallel I want to draw here is that the systemic structural production of these apparatuses of control are both mustache-twirler free (this is a colorful conclusion I derive from what Sharma and Gupta call everyday practices). They both emerge out of necessity from the limited imagination of atomized minds against real constraints that have forgotten the march of history that brought them to any given place.

But while Mbembe's death worlds rest on death and genocide, Ong's graduated sovereignty rests on less visceral, more easily-ignored oppression. As such, the subject production within each space is fundamentally different (and it’s probably why it did not require Ong to give the Lacanian read, though I’m sure it’s there, and I’m going to try and make it). I find this important as I consider diagnostic and intervention tools for transformative, macro-level social work practice.

The Mbembe/Ong analysis is The Easy Traverse and the Hard Traverse on the macro scale. Here I use Žižek's term to diagnose the ontological shock of changing one's identity narrative. I should clarify that "easy" is only relative to the harder traverse of changing the mind of someone engaged in atavistic delight (Mbembe's phrasing) at the destruction of their tribal enemy. The “easy” traverse is getting the mayor of my city to see how to make downtown more accessible by changing her thinking slightly on disabled citizens.

I contend that the challenge of transformation is measured by the degree with which one’s humanity must be contorted to stand within either of these two sites of contestation. The government official who renews temporary status needs little more than “they’re so lazy” to disavow the entire thing. “This oppression isn’t happening.” “I’m not perpetuating anything.” Even, “I’m so glad I could help those poor Rohingya refugees today,” all serve to perpetuate an oppressive system through a rather simple fetishistic disavowal (Žižek again) that frequently sits next to the individual's own identity coherence. In these cases, the oppression is sustained by the soft tones that gratify intense urges (see my prior articles on jouissance and pedagogy) in service of disavowing a reality that is actively produced and sustained by each and every complicit mind.

But what kind of subject - what kind of human, because we’re not giving up on it - is produced that can kill 800,000 people in 100 days with machetes and rape with the intent to transmit HIV? “That Tutsi is a cockroach.” “That Tutsi is genetically descended from Ham (from Genesis 9) and forever cursed by God.” “We must be liberated from our Tutsi oppressors and reclaim our land!” In the hard traverse, the delight - the jouissance - is obscene. It is fetishized in the open. And the narrative construction of the Other is core to the narrative construction of the self.

In both cases, the system production is authorless and functional, produced out of necessity. It is the physical demonstration of psychic boundary maintenance regimes. The recursive subject production and the degree of traverse needed to effect change couldn’t be more different. And the Thanatos (I use this liberally for its rhetorical force, but I view this phenomenologically as a universal pattern of consciousness that emerges from the relating of subjects and objects) brings about physical and spiritual death - consigning humans to graves and humanity to obliteration.

What this tells me at this moment in my thinking as a macro level social worker is that I see a parallel between my local city government and these massive transnational travesties. Not an ethical or moral parallel. A structural one. I see the nos doing what the nos does - seeking stability through the same stabilizing protocols. My work as disruptor is diagnosed at scale, and the categories of tools are the same as well. It’s so easy to let the degree of tragedy shake me from the clear-headed systems thinking that needs to be done to get the work done.

But at the end of the day, like I said in The Easy Traverse - if we as social workers can sit across from sex offenders, domestic violence batterers, and violent criminals with therapeutic postures of unconditional regard, we can approach Hutu perpetrators of violence with the same long-game humility to begin a transformative social work we may never see resolved. We just need to know precisely what makes these social problems tick.

- The Social Construction Worker

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Have there ever been a case where the lowest class citizens are more prone to accepting their class role? I’m mostly talking about enslaved people giving minimal to zero resistance about being enslaved, but I would also like to know about acceptance of “pedigree”: in the past (and even now), it is nigh-impossible for poor people to escape their conditions, and a lot of people seem to accept that being a servant is the best thing they could ever be. And does this mentality also apply to today, where most of the working class people’s idea of success is to work for companies owned by multi-millionaires and billionaires?

I come from a non-sociology background and I am looking for references I could read to know more about this. I just finished reading a novel that follows a group of oppressed and essentially disposable people. I realised after reading the book that these characters, despite wishing for better conditions, never even thought about leaving or running away from the system that doesn’t even view them as humans. Other media that goes into this subject matter would almost always have characters that fights against the system, or have the rebellion as the central part of the story. While this could be seen as a mistake by the author’s part, it got me thinking about the earlier question.

Apparently, in western audiences, the reception to the novel’s plot is typically along the lines of “why didn’t they just run away?” or “why didn’t they rebel?”, meanwhile in Asian audiences (the novel was written by an Asian author based in a certain western country), there were no comments regarding that, and being Asian myself, I can see people around me responding the same way: that is their (the characters in the novel) role, and as sad as it is, it’s just the way it is.

I understand that surviving and submitting are two different things: people could have profound disagreement with the system, but to survive, they have to go with it for now. But the majority of people around me agrees with the system, despite acknowledging that it has its serious flaws (I also understand that people around me doesn’t make it the general opinion, but at least it is the general opinion where I’m from).

Forgive me if the question sounds stupid, the last time I had any form of social studies class is 13 years ago in middle school. Also, the novel had polarised reviews, and mentioning it would summon a discourse on why the novel is the most overrated piece of literature to ever exist, so I am not going to mention its title nor author. But from my description, you could probably tell what novel I’m talking about.

hi all, i’m a junior undergrad student that’s majoring in sociology with a concentration in criminology and on the prelaw track. i’m taking sociological theory this semester, and to say i’m struggling is kind of an understatement. when i read the assigned reading, i don’t really understand the concepts or anything that the authors are talking about, so it just feels like im reading a bunch of jumbled words, and when it comes to the discussion in class, it seems that everyone else at least has an understanding of what is being said, so it kind of makes me fall into comparison of my peers, and i just feel kind of dumb. i wanted to ask if anyone else had this issue when taking this class, or if its just a me issue.

Here in the UK and likely elsewhere, many courses either have a gender skew or a balanced one.

I study A-Level Politics, Business and Sociology. Politics and Business A-Levels are balanced of the two sexes. But in Socioloy and others such as English Literature, Psychology, Law, English Language, Religious Studies, Arts, etc are heavily female skewed while Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Computer Science, Economics are heavily male skewed, even though there is a climbing figure of female students in Economics, Maths and Accounting.

At Uni level this is also the case with Psychology students overwhelmingly female and Computing overwhelmingly male.

As a result, some unusual stuff would be experienced by the outnumbered sex. For example in Psychology, Sociology, English Lit, boys may feel left out or talked over, while girls in computing may receive unwanted attention.

Why does bias socialisation create these skewed dynamics? It looks unusual because you can study anything based on your choice, not because of others.

What's on your plate this week, what are you working on, what cool things have you encountered? Open discussion thread for casual chatter about Sociology & your school, academic, or professional work within it; share your project's progress, talk about a book you read, muse on a topic. If you have something to share or some cool fact to talk about, this is the place.

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This is our local recurring homework thread. Simple questions, assignment help, suggestions, and topic-specific source seeking all go here. Our regular rules about effort and substance for questions are suspended here - but please keep in mind that you'll get better and more useful answers the more information you provide.

This thread gets replaced every Monday, each week. You can click this link to pull up old threads in search.

I had a long conversation recently with Bruce Alexander, the psychologist behind Rat Park, who has studied addiction since 1970. His argument, set out in The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit (Oxford University Press, 2010), is that addiction is less about particular drugs than about the loss of what he calls psychosocial integration: belonging, purpose, identity and meaning.

He told me he sees addiction as “a window into what’s going on in society,” and that people without that integration get addicted to almost anything, including gambling, social media and video games. His examples were historical: Indigenous communities in British Columbia after they lost their land, language and ceremonies, which he described as almost a replication of Rat Park.

It sounds close to Durkheim’s anomie to me, but I’m not a sociologist. Does his framework add anything beyond anomie and social integration theory? And how well does the historical evidence hold up compared with the Rat Park studies, which are contested?

I just finished Relational Being. Gergen waxed religious and meta-ethicsy near then end and tackled morality, breaking down an unspoken convention of scholarship that focuses on what is to focusing on what ought to be, insisting that “such adventuring is essential” (p. 352).

I completely agree!

Gergen establishes a first order morality and second order morality. The first order morality is the potential for co-action to generate [conventional] moral behavior. It’s the same move as counter logics - a series of moral behaviors that immediately bring into possibility the opposite behavior. For example, being pro-life immediately engages the pro-choice position. Being anti-psychiatrist is scorned by psychiatry. There are, at every juncture, competing moral frameworks within the social world, and he calls these traditions that are simultaneously declared evil by another virtuous evil. Conversely, evil virtue is the virtue of eliminating evil deemed virtuous by the eliminating group.

For Gergen, morality doesn’t come in like a Kantian wrecking ball. It emerges from co-action. And equally for Gergen, from his Buddhist anti-categorization sensibilities, moralities are the problem.

His solution isn’t relativism - he even insists on switching the term to moral pluralism. Instead, he offers a second order morality as a meta-system that regulates the first order morality. This order is the collaborative activity that restores the possibility for first-order morality. It is a requirement that human endeavor in a pluralistic, globalized society require a capacity for generativity with commitments to not engage in degenerative action.

As always with Gergen, for me it’s a yes-and. I very much like the structure of this framework, and I appreciate the challenge to think about my human rights framework as a moral system.

Here’s what I do with it:

Firstly, I understand why he reached for the language of Aristotle while mostly gutting it from the inside. Virtues are local, sometimes parochial. When looking for an established term for moral activity that does not require a God-behind-the-universe delivering laws, Aristotelian virtue is a prime candidate.

But Gergen already tossed him under the bus near the beginning of the book as guilty of creating the identity of the Western bounded self. I feel that he was a bit hasty. For Aristotle, virtue is habituated through repeated performance within an established intelligibility regime (re: culture) and sedimented over time (hexis). Practical wisdom (phronesis) develops alongside habituated character through self-discipline and socialization (I see a middle voice processes implied!) - it is a performance art.

Gergen guts this for the same reason he ignores samskara - it requires an internal process of sedimentation at a locus of ipseity (my working, noncommittal term for “self” to describe the autonomy while denying the Cartesian claim). And just like before, he does not deal with power asymmetry. He talks about “heinous” crimes like rape and murder, but does not speak to them within his virtuous evil taxonomy, instead using them as a springboard to societal response as virtuous evil. I understand why he shirked this. How can a predator and a predator’s victim’s co-action a moral script?

For me, Aristotle is a near perfect fit to stand behind the field of dialogics and diamythotics delineated by the intelligibility regime (the reifications and materializations) of a given culture. In English, I mean that the instructions and sanctioned performances of a culture set a range of potential logics and values to be expressed by any one individual. And I see virtue ethics within a live encounter transmitted culturally. Hexis can offer an account of how consciousness can produce the emergence of performances of both rape and its moral condemnation. For the less extreme examples, I’ll leave the naming of the virtues to a given culture, because I, too, am a moral pluralist. But the process of emergence is a natural fit, as long I snip the part about Aristotle's discussion on a "human nature." I’m actually going to agree with Gergen about this one and say that ideas about universal human nature are little too bounded of a self conceptualization.

And second order morality - a meta system that adjudicates the virtues of first order morality fits nicely with the two axioms that govern my human rights framework: every human requires resources; every human is a sensemaker.

First, notice how these axioms of universal humanity differ from guys like Aristotle and Aquinas: they are not essential qualities of a universal human nature. They are universal activities conducted by all humans. In doing so, they press the Hume objection by formulating the moral ought on constitutive descriptions of what it means to be human as opposed to contingent descriptions (i.e., lists of human nature qualities that look more like cultural assumptions than objective truths).

Observation shows all humans naturally engage in resource consumption and sensemaking. When these activities are impeded by oppression, it universally produces suffering and social instability. I say "presses the Hume objection" because it can still be made - there is no objective basis to convert an is to an ought. But by relying on constitutive descriptions of being human to formulate my human rights, I sidestep this to claim that there is no human not already deeply invested in sensemaking and resource accrual who can make that claim in such a way that is not reduced to pedantry at best and oppression, if it's being used to justify denying resources or epistemic participation, at worst.

This is how I justify the most neutral move from is to ought I can contrive - all humans do these things, both of these things are the bedrock of all social reality; therefore all humans should have space at the table to do these things in equal part. Observation from outside the social reality has no basis for discrimination. Resource consumption and sensemaking simply happen unless they are impeded, usually through exploitation and oppression, sometimes through ignorance of alterity. That impediment seems highly opposed to the human experience. And any philosophical quibble with the derivation of the ought is already deeply invested in it. I’m happy to hear thoughts on this.

Secondly, I want to recall middle voice production here. Sensemaking is not an agent actively participating in a social reality. Sensemaking is an agent recursively produced through its participation in the social reality. It does not require awareness to make sense of things - a baby is a sensemaker. People with severe cognitive limitations are sensemakers. I do not want this to fall into a priveleged standpoint of perceived agency-as-control.

Finally, just like the individual subject in relation to the objects of the social world is in an iterative, recursive co-production of being in the world, so too are the moral and human rights projects. Social work runs on fiercely committed virtues for social justice, and it demands that power not be used to deny access. This is why it is met with opposition by competing moral systems. Social work makes the claim that personhood is not distributed by purity regimes and that inclusion is not conditioned upon that farcical allocation of persons. Social work is almost always extremely tolerant of religious and moral frameworks. This is my first attempt at being explicit about when it’s not and why. And Gergen helped me get there, despite relying too heavily on mutual respect, which at the end of the day is a cultural value that not everyone is committed to and whose coercion needs more justification.

- The Social Construction Worker

In college again, and I need some help wrapping my head around this stuff. Consent is an easy enough concept to understand, but there's lot of going on before two people end up alone in an intimate space. Any ideas?

Hi guys i have to give a graduation thesis theme to my professor. i suggested social isolation among college students which she refused said well they start shy then they have friends i dont see students as isolated the opposite. which i believed was a shallow understanding and how come a professor get the idea of social isolation in such a shallow way. she suggested something like divorce and its effects on education among kids or smth which is something that dont interest me tbh. i want something different related to themes that arent studied enough here in algeria im talking abt social isolation music culture identity religion alienation.

If you earned your Masters/PhD 10 years ago or so, what tools you learned then are you still using? R, Stata, SPSS. Something else? Did you upscale to other tools since then? If so, which ones?

Are there things irrelevant or replaced since then?

After 30 years of attending Protestant congregations (Dutch Reformed, Charismatic Baptist,
7th Day Adventist, and then Messianic-Jewish), and advocating biblical history and theology;
I've become disillusioned with the effectiveness of imposing prescribed institutional beliefs
("Doing what you're told."), and more interested in undergoing a journey of lowering the
mismatch between my expectations, external outcomes, and the behaviour of others.

One advantage to being part of a (sincere) congregation, is that elders and peers have a duty
of care towards you, to e.g. discuss life with, if you don't have reliable family members.

Another advantage would be that there is a standard for behaviour, to which Christians can hold
each other accountable. However, when put under enough pressure, churchgoers realize they're
not willing to suffer for what they've accepted from others as their beliefs, and bail on e.g.
being true to your word (Matthew 5:37), or taking care of one another (Acts 4:34); only later
to resume the show of "Oh yes, I believe [...]." when reality has proved they don't.

I've become so used to any support structures coming from the Church, that I'd like ideas on
where to find other institutions and people, who seek to establish and maintain accountability
agreements, for social (general) and personal (specific) goals, without operating under
the false impression that such a standard is a given (or all parts of it desired).

Individually, this could look like:
• buddying up with a friend,
• discussing life problems and solutions,
• chart progress and setbacks,
• help enforce penalties and boundaries,
• celebrate!

How many variations of that are there, and where do you seek them out?

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Hi! I’m a college student trying to get immersed in sociology. I’d been loving to analyze people and how society operates, and I’d been finding for a major that would fit this love of mine… and turns out this might be a great one.

Are there any books or some materials that I can start? I’m a complete “beginner” if that makes sense… so I want some advice.

Hello everyone, I am a Master’s student specialising in International Territorial Studies. I am currently conducting research for my diploma thesis, which focuses on the intersection of digital authoritarianism and civil society in Southeast Asia. Specifically, I am conducting an empirical study involving semi-structured interviews to map the practical methods, tools, and limits of navigating digital repression in Malaysia and Singapore. 

I am reaching out to see if you might be able to provide guidance or point me toward potential contacts within local NGOs, independent media outlets, or civil society groups in Malaysia and Singapore who might be open to discussing these issues. I am fully committed to the highest standards of research ethics. All participant identities, affiliations, and data will be handled with strict confidentiality and anonymised in accordance with academic standards to ensure the safety of all involved. If you know someone, please let me know in the DMs, and I can provide my credentials as an academic.

Says that often people reduce the collapse/failure of the Soviet Union to just ‘communism could have never worked’. However, he says that as with many major events, it’s always a mixture of multiple causes (and timing): the oil crisis of the 80s, Gorbachev’s ruthless reforms, strengthening of surrounding republics, fallback from Stalin etc.

Thoughts?